Why Defense Debates Are Unbalanced

A reporter asked me the other day why my side of the military budget debate—for slashing spending—has been quiet lately. Given that I have been spending too much time makingsucharguments, I was slightly annoyed. The conversation was a useful reminder that most people, even reporters and policy wonks, do not think about how the debate about defense favors the status quo. People assume that Beltway debates are broad, that the marketplace of ideas works, and that by reporting what happens in Congress, the Pentagon and think tanks, reporters give a fair sense of the issue.

They do not, and it’s not really their fault. There is a two-part explanation. The first is the standard collective-action story. Defense spending creates concentrated benefits and diffuse costs. Terms like “iron-triangle” or “military-industrial complex” are shorthand for its beneficiaries. Agencies get budget, contractors and districts get jobs, and their representative gets votes thanks to that spending. Ambition, funding and socialization tiethe think tanks that one hears from most on defense to defense interests.

We all pay slightly higher taxes for excessive military spending but not enough to incentivize much organized resistance. So the opposition is weak: usually a smattering of libertarians, taxpayer advocates and the remnants of the antiwar movement. Those interests get juiced by wars, which greatly impact a minority of Americans, and by austerity, which makes military spending a threat to other concentrated interests, like lower taxes and growing entitlement spending.

But even today, wars touch few Americans. And the Budget Control Act’s spending caps have shaken but not collapsed the compromise underlying the status quo of entitlement spending growth, military spending growth and current tax rates. The Tea Party movement has not much eroded establishment Republican support for the Pentagon. Democrats with power over military budgets remain unwilling to sacrifice much of it for entitlements. So while the anti-military spending side has gained allies of late, it remains the weaker side.

The second part of the explanation is that unbalanced interests create unbalanced debate. Journalists and editors claim to be watchdogs, but they remain too busy, dilettantish and dependent on official sources to much analyze official pronouncements on their own.

Institutionalized debate is what fuels critical press coverage, and conflict among powerful interests brings that sort of debate. Hawks still dominate the official places where defense gets argued—the Pentagon, the relevant congressional committees, the think tanks favored by officialdom—so the debate that gets reported remains narrow.